Looking into the Wishing Well. By Matthew Gengler, Access Services and… | by Cleveland Museum of Art | CMA Thinker | Oct, 2022

By Matthew Gengler, Access Products and services and Reference Librarian

In a pivotal scene from The Child from Cleveland, actors George Brent and a youthful Russ Tamblyn stand around the Cleveland Museum of Art’s wishing perfectly. Tamblyn, playing the child, is invited to make a want Johnny. The film, established in 1949, is a family members melodrama that follows a young boy with a tricky household lifestyle who is helped by his favorite baseball workforce. While the film may well not be value observing for the plot, the mid-century footage of the museum’s first galleries is a handle. The scene with the wishing nicely is even showcased on the poster for the motion picture. Then museum director William Milliken, a devoted baseball admirer, would have enthusiastically accredited filming in the galleries.

The true star of the scene, the museum’s beloved pink limestone wishing effectively — at present set up in the Susan M. Kaesgen Schooling Gallery and Foyer — has a instead exciting historical past. Officially known as a Well Head, the wishing effectively very first arrived at the museum in 1929, obtaining been sent by the supplier on instruction (and assure of payment) of the museum’s European consultant, Harold Woodbury Parsons. At the time, Parsons relished independence in gathering for the museum, and with enough cause. About his vocation working as agent of the Cleveland Museum of Art, as perfectly as the then Nelson Museum in Kansas Town, Parsons manufactured important acquisitions that formed the CMA’s collection of European art. Amongst the treasures he obtained for the museum is The Holy Spouse and children with the Infant Saint John and Saint Margaret by Filippino Lippi, a masterpiece of Italian portray.

Regretably, this time Parsons experienced overstepped his authority, a fact manufactured public by Milliken in his autobiography, Born Underneath the Sign of Libra, in which he criticizes Parsons for getting “more rash than vigilant.” Perhaps Parsons could be forgiven for his mistake, looking at the leeway furnished him by the museum. Elsewhere in the exact volume, Milliken refers to him as “an indefatigable intermediary” and praises how much money he saves the museum via his deft acquisitions. Even so, in this instant, he misjudged his client’s interests and the wishing well arrived, albeit unwelcome.

This didn’t stop its exhibition, on the other hand. The earliest photos of the wishing properly from 1931 present it put in in the inside backyard courtroom of the museum. With its caged songbirds and unique vegetation, the placing offered a space of tranquil repose for the exhausted museum customer to pause and reflect. The wishing properly helped to complete the illusion right until the museum approached an vital milestone.

In anticipation of the museum’s twenty-fifth anniversary celebration in 1941, the director decided that the nicely need to be employed for a silver coin assortment to reward museum acquisitions, contacting it the Silver Jubilee Treasure Pool. The wishing perfectly was set up in the rotunda, where the marble statue of Terpsichore Lyran (the muse of lyric poetry) by Antonio Canova now stands (at the time, the Canova experienced not entered the assortment, and resided at Exbury Property in Hampshire, Uk, in the assortment of Lionel de Rothschild).

In his unpublished heritage of the collection, Milliken describes museum benefactor Elisabeth Severance Prentiss, a statuesque muse in her possess correct, at the function as a “grand dame, with her elegance, heightened by her wonderful night gown and her dazzling jewels, tossing silver dollars from throughout the Rotunda.” The treasure pool was a fantastic accomplishment with donations topping $4,000 in the jubilee calendar year.

The initially will work obtained for the assortment with donations from the perfectly were being Could Display entries which include Harvest by Katherine Greuner Lange and Backward Look, a scarce watercolor operate by John Paul Miller. This started a lengthy tradition of working with the Silver Jubilee Treasure Fund, renamed the Wishing Effectively Fund in 1961, to receive objects by community artists. From 1944 to 1993, the museum acquired just about 200 objects with the fund, principally from the yearly May perhaps Present. In numerous ways, donations to the Wishing Well have been donations to the inventive legacy of Cleveland.

Soon after nearly 14 several years of assistance to the institution, the perfectly head that Mr. Parsons transported without approval entered the collection, in 1943. This item proceeds to hold the fascination of site visitors who peer down into the depths, toss a coin, and make a desire. Museum guests who have contributed their coins to the wishing effectively can justifiably level to the artwork in the galleries bearing the Silver Jubilee or Wishing Effectively fund attribution and say that they experienced a part in building the acquisition attainable.